Waking
by Faeline
Summary: One-shot I wrote a while back. Barbossa/Tia-Dalma. A missing scene from Dead Man's Chest: Barbossa's resurrection.


Summary: Just a little one-shot I wrote a while back.

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"Waking"

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"Wake den, Barbossa," she whispered through the candle light and the heady herbal smoke, "you damn stubborn man." She passed her hand over his chest once more, drawing the conch shell—dipped in a mixture of sea water and plants harvested from the swamp—down his breast, over the place his heart should beat. She tapped it against his chest once, twice, three times.

His eyes snapped open, pupils flat and black, obscuring the iris so only a ring of grey remained. Sightless and seeking, he reached out and she moved forward, let his arms slide around her, allowed his grasping fingers to find their way beneath the laces of her gown.

Hands cold from death and ocean water skimmed the pearls of her spine, pulled and peeled the dress away from her as lips fastened to her neck.

He had never been what one might call a _gentle_ lover. His caresses possessed first, teeth and tongue brought blood to the surface and on occasion split skin, and his thrusts were sometimes enough to leave a bone weary ache throughout her muscles.

But the balm would come after. A sweep of tongue, a shiver of lips and breath over teeth and nail marks.

But death changes men, leaves the base, the visceral and she knew not to expect such balm this time.

Teeth clamped around her nipple and she gasped, arched into him further; one of his arms wound around her waist, the other slid up her back, fingers catching and holding the hair close to her scalp.

He licked a swathe up her chest, hovered over the beat of her heart; he burrowed, nipped at the skin as though trying to get past the flesh and bone to devour the heart beat for himself. She brought his face to hers, looked into eyes dark with the last remnants of death. Those eyes found her mouth, lips and tongue and teeth following.

She fell to his grasp, let him move her, push her down onto the bed he lay on for weeks as she gathered her concoctions and awaited for the right shape of moon and flow of tides. Her dress was gone in a matter of moments and his fingers fumbled for the ties of his breeches.

"Come on den," she hissed, pushing his hands aside and finishing the job herself. "Dey be waitin' for you, dey be needin' someone to lead 'em to World's End. I am waitin'."

And when he pushed into her, she welcomed the slow burning intrusion, closed her eyes for the familiarity, and the pulse of heat that fled up her spine to lie at the back of her brain. "I have missed dis..." she whispered against the shell of his ear, threw her head back as he half growled, half groaned.

There was work to be done still.

She grasped the dagger she'd put close by, ran the blade across her palm and tossed it aside, out of reach. She curled her fingers through his hair, down across the bristled curve of his jaw, traced his lips with her fingernails. Her bleeding palm pressed to his mouth and his tongue darted out, warm and wet, suckling the blood.

And she threw her head back, chanting. Old words, powerful words, lost to time and ocean tides. They fell from her lips, broke in the air like foam on the shore, cascading across her, across him, leaving them both damp, him fevered.

She pulled him to her again; his mouth was warm now, and the brine and blood taste had fled, leaving only the flavor of him, musk and spice. She breathed a phrase into his mouth and curled the words around his tongue.

The last declaration she sent to the moon rising just outside the window, its silver light hazy over the trees of the swamp. And she heard an answering call, in the lap of the tide against her dock, the dance of the fishes in the reeds, when he stiffened in her arms.

She let herself go and sang more sea phrases into his ear as the world fell around them.

When she opened her eyes moments later, he was staring down at her, eyes no longer fatted on death, taking in the curves of her face. They were again the color of the ocean shallows.

"If this be the welcome I get on return, I may have to die more often."

"Don' you dare," she said, shifting, "it's a hard month's work tryin' to bring de dead back to life an' I don' fancy doin' it again any time soon."

"Surely," he said, and she felt him flutter inside her, growing hard again, "ye wouldn't begrudge a man one…more…little death."

Her mouth stretch before she could stop herself. "'s fine," she purred, "but we be spillin' your blood dis time," and she ran her fingers down his back, relishing the shudder of his body as the skin yielded and split.


End file.
